Ruby Granger #5 Counting Her Ad Money With Closed, Grateful Eyes

[Tinabean]

I get the feeling that their mum was a bit similar to Martha when she was that she! Ruby definitely seems the most uptight member of the family, for whatever reason.

Omg agreed! Have always thought maybe it’s an Ab Fab setup lol like wee hermione’s upstairs in the everlasting boater rereading terf rowling’s CV for the 900th time while everyone else is swinging from the chandeliers downstairs in the mansion

 

[tsuyu]

Just a clarification. I'm sure that Ruby doesn't mean anything sinister by this, but from an adult and gendered perspective, it's interesting how we give adult women a pass to show interest in children/childhood. As if there's something inherently childlike and innocent in grown women that makes them incapable of doing harm. A man of Ruby's age would certainly be questioned more critically. I just found it interesting that Ruby does such a good job at playing a child that we forget that she's actually in her 20s.

Actually that’s a really good point and something I think needs to be considered a lot more when ruby is playing dress up as a child. We as a society would definitely be treating it differently if she was male

 

[Deeznutslol]

Yeah I would also add that hating on her for wearing a specific item of clothing (e.g. white tights) seems more childish than her outfits. It's not much about WHAT she wears, as much as the upkeep (it is clean, not wrinkly), the fit/size, combination and overall outfit...
As long as it look more or less put together, I couldn't care less if it looked "baby like" - what would you guys say about the lolita/kawaii dressing style then? I only care that she doesn't seem two faced between her oveproductive online persona and then the slob habits we discover once we dig a bit deeper (not that deep even)

Yeah but saying she’s wearing an outfit that looks childish is hardly ‘hating’ on her. If she likes it then that’s great, but no one here is saying she shouldn’t be allowed to wear it haha.

 

[3calico3]

Followed by ”I decided”. No wonder she goes on and on about decision fatigue if she has to constantly make a big deal about deciding to open the window or what to have for a snack.

I always find her use of the phrase very interesting. Normally, if it's routine things, you don't 'decide' to do them, you just... do them? Deciding to brush your teeth, deciding to make your bed, deciding to check your emails - it should be all very passive stuff. You shouldn't need to be so hyper-engaged when you do the smallest of tasks.

 

[wastelandbaby]

I think Ruby could do well going down the handmade clothes path with her videos, talking more about sustainability etc. I feel like she puts so little effort into things though? Like this was almost entirely open at the back, she had to put a skirt on under. It's like with that book she was writing at Christmas, she just seems to sort of rush through things.

It looks like a 5 year old dressing herself for the first time. Tbh that can be said about any of Ruby's outfits lol

I think I made the same dress at one point - for a Sylvanian Families toy, I was 8.

 

[Lola123]

Can't believe her fans are saying she's not rich, no average 18 year old would be able to become a landlord wtf?? Also private schools are often more expensive than universities so I wouldn't be surprised if her parents are paying her tuition as well as maintenance

I don’t think you learn the true value of being rich until you’re older, like i went to a school in a deprived area and didn’t know anyone who was rich, most parents worked but not in prestige jobs like lawyers etc I think went to uni and ended up dating a boy like Ruby who’s parents paid for everything up front because they could simply afford to and my mind was blown how rich they must be. 12 years olds probably think rich is being the queen but they’ll soon learn.

 

[CatCafe234]

the only time i can remember ruby "saying" that they have financial worry or something is in erimentha parker's to do list (i mean erimentha is her sooo hahaha) like she mentioned in the book that if not because of the scholarship, she can't enter the private school and whatnot

I believe that this bit was added in later when Ruby re-edited the book, to make Erimentha more relatable. To me, it just made the novel confusing as she didn’t edit out any of the other bits related to how ‘well-off‘ Erimentha’s family clearly was - like the private tennis lessons, mama’s childhood in Paris, the polyglot grandmama in a lovely private home and the walk-in pantry (and yes I know a family can have these things and not be well-off but Ruby editing in one line about a scholarship without thinking about it more widely just smacked of tokenism).

 

[kbjhguih]

Theres a difference between Ruby making a well researched video about the Victorian working class morning routines and talking through it with evidence ... vs acting it all out, charcoal on her cheeks, in her mini mansion in the countryside.

And we all know she'd do the second.

 

[lemonpoppyseed]

i’m supposed to be studying and as i’m logging in and out of online textbooks, i cannot get this specific erimenthaism out of my head, where she refers to her eating porridge with water as her “shibboleth”

................ffs

Moments like this remind me of being a kid who read a lot and was considered "gifted" and so would pronounce words like hyperbole as "hyper-bowl" because I had only ever seen it written. The difference is that I was 11 though, not 20. I still sometimes lie awake at night and get a sudden wave of cringe however.

 

[Welshgal]

I’ve said this before on someone’s thread but if you have to put a disclaimer before a video you should think really hard about the content and idea of that video! Most often a video following a disclaimer should have never seen the light of day.

I think it would have be more informative for me to read Wikipedia for 9 minutes. There was so little information and like someone said it was just a ruse for her to be able to role play and hide from reality

 

[Ilaariaa]

Am I making this up or didn't it come out later than this was a formative essay and therefore didn't matter anyway? Either way most (all?) degrees don't take your first year grades into account for your final degree classification...

I know literally jack shit about how the UK university system works but this is so embarrassing all around. I get being upset over grades. I often obsess over grades as well (although I don't think I've ever cried about it, and all my grades count towards my final score, and I have a nearly perfect GPA which I would absolutely hate to ruin with a lower grade).
But it's not a healthy attitude to have, I am aware of that, and choosing to cry over your grades in a Youtube video when most of your audience is made up of young people who look up to you as a model is incredibly irresponsible and immature. Especially if the grade doesn't even matter in the end! Oh my God. I hope this girl never has to face some real failure or misfortune if this is how she reacts to a lower grade that won't even matter.

 

[opal73]

anyway, i was having another scroll through her mum's blog out found this entry. i guess we now know why the house is so dirty!

Her blog is...interesting? To say the least. I think the whole family (aside from her banker dad we rarely get a glimpse of) seems to be in their own little orbits. Anyway, I'm surprised they don't use a cleaning service if they're too lazy to do it considering they could easily afford it probably.

 

[Deeznutslol]

I know quite a few people who went to private schools whose parents continued to pay their tuition at uni. £9k a year is significantly less than the fees at most independent schools - for reference the annual fees at Ruby’s day school are currently just under £20k and if you were a full boarder at the very famous school just down the road from her house, you’d be looking at an annual fee of just over £40k so uni seems like a bit of a bargain, even with accommodation etc.

Yeah I was gonna say, her parents could afford to send both their kids to private school for their entire education, uni fees are probably small change to them

 

[lemonpoppyseed]

Usual disclaimer applies, I would warn readers however that this chapter contains some Golden Child/Black Sheep dynamic at play, it might be triggering to those who have grown up with it.

Spoiler: Erimentha Parker's to do list, Chapter 21

Erimentha decides to stay home for the day after the PE incident, and they walk Nathan to school. He's not shoved into oncoming traffic but they race to the end of the road, he wins. She patronisingly pats him on the back, allowing this little victory, but soon asserts her authority as the dominant child.

"Did you know..."
He cuts her off. "No more facts!"
Mum, with a few working synapses left, tells him off for 'being mean'. "We love Erimentha's little factoids."

This is all very uncomfortable. It's the reason Nathan will one day change his name to Lewis and lie to his girlfriend that his parents are dead.

Erimentha talks about how her parents met at university during exam season, which is completely irrelevant and Erimentha is very critical of the idea of love (her emphasis). Nathan also finds it cringe, because he's a stereotypical eight year old (yes reader, sadly he is also regressing, by age - although this might be better for him, one day he'll be a random sperm living in blissful ignorance)

Erimentha notes that given her height, she could pass for Year 5 in her old school.

She sees her former teacher - who forgets her duty of care to a classroom of children and chats with Erimentha, and she's convinced something is wrong. She notes that her teacher seems like a maternal figure due to her oversized glasses and wrinkles. Ouch #bekind, Erimentha Wintour! The teacher encourages her to tell her parents or the teachers at the school, but Erimentha seems to think being bullied = weakness.

Oof, another Ruby malapropism. I don't know what she was doing in her re-edit. Factoid actually means "an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact". Or possibly Erimentha's mum is subtly shading her?

Also thanks to everyone who replied about Clare's blog! I have always got the impression that despite her family and her sister being wildly different, they seem quite close and loving. Clare does give me the impression of some middle class woman who was an absolute wild child back in the day, living in a squat as an "artist" as an act of rebellion and then by 25 became a very mumsy, Lib Dem type who lives in the countryside. I can see her living this again through Martha a bit haha.

I have subscribed to a fashion newsletter and they advertised this homewear and tell me, why can I see Roobee wearing this?
View attachment 430540

I always see things like this advertised as nightwear and think they look great until I remember that I often have to go pee around 3am and would probably just end up wetting myself if I had to get out of this half-asleep.

 

[CatCafe234]

What did irritate me about that (apart from all of it) was that there was very little context - as in, the Victorian period lasted for a very long time and saw massive social, political and economic change. You can’t just quote a figure for a wage, for example, without giving an indication of when that figure was from - early, mid or late Victorian?

 

[Deeznutslol]

I agree, but I do bad for ruby though. She’s like this because her mum enables it and encourages it, her mum seems like she’s not really done much apart from raise kids, work part time and write blog posts. She’s been very involved with rubys videos recently as well (prob due to lockdown) and the way she acts with ruby, it’s like she doesn’t see a problem at all. I understand it to an extent, some parents struggle when they realise all their kids have left home to get jobs or go to uni, they want to hang on to them as if they’re still kids, but it’s just going to damage ruby in the long term

 

[sergeantsantiago]

Oh lordt, the ”small dead mouse” bit is lifted directly from Anne with an E

OT, but Ruby’s published self-fanfic just reminds me how grateful I am to have had the foresight to make a shame AO3 account when I first tried writing sex scenes...

I also ‘wrote’ a book when I was like 10 and am hugely grateful that the publishers my mum sent it out to never got back to me, lol

 

[buflesse]

I'm not surprised she's got it, given that the uni has paid her to do ads for them before...

 

[CatCafe234]

Theres a difference between Ruby making a well researched video about the Victorian working class morning routines and talking through it with evidence ... vs acting it all out, charcoal on her cheeks, in her mini mansion in the countryside.

And we all know she'd do the second.

I’ve no idea how she can do anything else. It would be really strange for her to pretend to be working class and Victorian in her manor house, unless she goes down the servant route (which I bet she does). Whatever she does is going to be slightly tasteless play-acting with juvenile analysis - ‘this is a bathroom, poor Victorians didn’t have bathrooms and they washed using jugs in their bedrooms. This is my bedroom, poor Victorians would have had to share bedrooms and it would have been very cold. I like the cold!’

 

[lizzie2707]

I think a move towards more booktube content could actually be interesting, I tend to watch those kinds of channels and if Ruby engages more critically with books it could really work well for her.

I'm very dubious about her working class Victorian morning routine - my research specialism is gender and class in the 19th century and I think I'll find it very difficult to hold my tongue. If Ruby does her normal romanticised take on the topic it will most likely come across as massively insensitive and problematic, especially coming from Ruby's extremely privileged position.

Agreed! I'd be genuinely up for a monthly round up of books she's read, with some proper analysis of them rather than just 'I liked this'. Obviously this is assuming it's not all kids books - I'm sure it won't be though given she'll presumably have some uni stuff on there. My main issue with Ruby content wise (so excluding her privilege etc), is that it's all very repetitive and very childish. I think some more grown up videos where she actually shows us some intelligence and adult thoughts would be genuinely interesting.

Yeah I'm really not sure about the working class routine. We were all critical of her for making an upper class one and passing that off as being 'normal', so I know now criticising her for a working class one might seem unfair (sorry Ruby if you're reading!!), but really I just think she shouldn't have done any in the first place. I just can't see a way it isn't going to be incredibly insensitive and poverty porn-y.